Utopia, you are standing in it!

https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1049109464035414017

Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. He is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

In this segment of a lecture he gave last year, Dr. Hanson discusses the hypocrisy of the Left when it comes to equality. He especially gives interesting insights into intellectuals, like Al Gore, who seek fame and fortune while they study or advocate for Leftist causes.

In this post I write about the connections between Paul Romer’s work, which is essentially applied theory, and the empirical work on long-run economic growth done by economic historians. How was Romer influenced by the work of economic historians? has he influenced economic history? and have his theories been confirmed by the recent work of economic historians? (preview: I will argue that the answer is no).

Addendum shortly after publishing: my point above is not that Romer is wrong in general; in fact some of his ideas *about ideas* are fundamental for us to think about growth in the past. (Read on if this isn’t clear yet.)

Paul Romer’s was a well-deserved and long-anticipated prize. Many predicted he would eventually win, including myself in my very first academic article, written when I was a undergradute and published in 2008. (alternatively, click here for an ungated version). I now…

The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith

In a previous academic book, The Logic of Political Survival, the authors and others presented arguments in favor of a political model called selectorate theory. The Dictator’s Handbook is the popular (non-mathematical) version of that book. Oftentimes in political discourse we take disparate political systems and filter them into a one dimensional axis, with democracy on one end and autocracy on the other (a similar filtering happens when widely varying views on morality and policy are squeezed into the left-right axis). What selectorate theory instead argues for is a categorization of political systems into three nested groups:

• The nominal selectorate, or interchangeables, includes those people who have at least some legal say in the selection of political leaders. In United States federal elections, this includes all adults over the age…

This is a superb paper by Beatrice Cherrier and Juan Acosta. In history of central banking, we barely look at role and evolution of economic research at the central bank. Did it influence policies and if yes in what way and if no why? Who were the key people in this economic research team and so on. Most of these people are also unsung but do quite a lot of work in the central bank.

This paper looks at eco research at Federal Reserve:

In this paper, we build on data on Fed officials, oral history repositories and hitherto under-researched archival sources to unpack the torturous path toward crafting an institutional and intellectual space for postwar economic analysis within the Fed. We show that growing attention to new macroeconomic research was a reaction to both mounting external criticisms against the Fed’s decision-making process and a process internal to the discipline whereby…

Last week, a trio of scholars perpetrated what people are now calling the “Sokal 2.0” hoax. They wrote 20 (!) papers on obviously bizarre and bogus topics and tried to get them published in various journals in the humanities and the “softer” social sciences. There are many commentaries you can read but I want to focus on two points:

First, if a scholarly community wants respect and financial support, they need to show that they can weed out garbage in their journals. That includes kooks, cranks, impostors, incompetents, and provocateurs. If editors can’t spot obvious trash, then they get what they deserve. The only people who deserve our sympathy are the peer reviewers, whose time was wasted.

Second, sociological journals rejected all the bogus manuscripts sent to them. On Twitter, Will Wilkinson had a good summary. The issue is that sociology is at its core a positivist discipline. That’s just…

How fast can buildings be built these days?